Tuesday, July 13

Fatally Damaged Derailleur on Road Bike. Missing Pulley Was the Least of the Problems.
Hmm, reading Big Oak's post about his axle breaking, perhaps things are going around. In my case, they aren't going around. At least I didn't bust a wheel.

I rode my road bike to work this morning. More accurately, I rode it 90% of the way to work this morning. At that point, a rear derailleur pulley bolt departed and flew to points unknown, as did the associated pulley. After some fruitless looking around, I found that I could still power the beast with one particular gear combination as long as I didn’t mind it skipping if I pedaled too hard, and if I held my breath a lot. That let me limp the last two miles in. At lunch, I concluded that I’d been lucky to go two miles, and no jury rigging would keep it together well enough to get home under power. What's more, enough parts of the derailleur are bent, that I think I shall ride Buddy to work for a bit while I see if I can't get a replacement. While I do not recall “ABC Quick Check” instructing us to check the security of derailleur pulley bolts, I shall add this incident to my long and growing list of “ABC” things that go wrong. I can’t really say I’ve ever had a derailleur come apart this way before except when I was dismantling them on purpose. This particular derailleur was last dismantled about 250 miles ago. Maybe it’s bad karma from Big Oak’s axle.

Just as with Jaguars, on rare occasions, it’s best to give the vehicle a ride home…

7 comments:

At least you avoided having to walk the last two miles to work. Do you wear road or mountain bike shoes on your commute? There is nothing worse than having to walk long distances in road shoes and cleats.

I once had a pedal come apart in a very strange and un-field-fixable manner. I guess you can't check everything before every ride to see if anything is going to fail in an unexpected way--if you did that, the maintenance check would take longer than most rides! The maintenance interval should be proportional to the odds of failure--the less probably the failure, the less often you need to check it. Although I guess there's also an "expected cost" factor to weigh in there, too: even if unlikely, if failure would cause catastrophe, it may pay to check it more frequently than probability of failure would indicate.

Sorry for the bad karma, man. I guess that goes to show that if you ride something long enough, odd stuff is going to happen. Unless you take your derailleur apart on a monthly basis to clean it, I don't know how you could have kept from losing that bolt. I just cleaned my axle, bearings, and bearing cups in February on that bike.

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Subject MatterMostly it's about local transportation cycling, as it exists in the here and now. It's got a smattering of other gratuitous toy recreation thrown in to keep y'all a little off balance. For those that don't know me, toy recreation means English & Italian cars, aircraft - and downhill skiing.